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Will Brennan? With some adjustments, maybe he will.
It was just over a week ago when we got to see the Guardians back in action after a long winter break. As we are reintroduced to the team we all know and love for Spring Training, most of our attention is brought to how our players have improved or regressed since last October. We get to see the adjustments everyone may have made to their mechanics, and everyone gets to wildly predict how those adjustments may help or burden themselves over the course of the season.
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I am very optimistic about the adjustments that one Guardians outfielder made. This may be just another wild take, or I may actually have some truth to these words. My proposition is that Will Brennan may have started to use some of the untapped power potential that I once thought he had (and started to fix some other minor problems at the plate).
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First off, I’ve always found it confusing how Will Brennan has never been able to hit the ball very hard. Just looking at his frame, I could really tell that he may not be using all of the pop that he may have in store. Brennan stands in at 6’0”, weighing 200 pounds. Now, it’s not uncommon for players with this stature to be devoid of any sort of pop, but I don’t think it’s as uncommon as to keep Brennan from putting up an isolated power (ISO) greater than .100 like it happened last year. For him to hit only 5 homers with an average ballplayer frame and nearly enough plate appearances to be a qualified hitter makes it seem like there’s more to be seen from Brennan in the power department.
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This leads me to my next point: His mechanics, or rather, his change in mechanics. And when it comes to how Brennan looks, he seems almost entirely different from his stance to the point where he launches his hands. In this upcoming side-by-side comparison of Brennan’s swing last year vs. now, you’ll see that the adjustments he made are huge. On top of that, I found a possible reason as to why Will has missed so much power.
First, I am going to cover one minor adjustment Will has made to his stance — one that could actually help his pitch perception rather than his power, however. Brennan in 2023 had a fair deal of plate discipline issues, ranking in the 6th percentile in chase rate at 38%. For a player with Will’s archetype at the plate, that is not pretty. That being said, Brennan has always had a closed stance. The significance of this is that when you close your stance and stand with parallel feet, your head isn’t able to turn that easily. This is likely the reason why, over the winter, Will offset his lead foot a bit to open his stance and free up his head, allowing him to perceive pitches better./cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/71878916/1244125546.0.jpg)
Now the other adjustments that I see are very important and possibly game-changing for Brennan. You can see that in 2023, Will’s hands are high and outstretched. You can also notice that as he loads, there is a lot of movement of his hands leading up to the point where he launches them. Now when you watch him during Spring Training this year, his hands are much lower and anchored to his shoulder. Not only that but he’s cut off a lot of extra movement of the hands during the load. This leads me to believe that the problem with his power last year came with how he used his hands. To me, it looks like Brennan didn’t keep his hands connected to the rest of his body.
When I say this, I mean that Brennan is just swinging with his hands, and isn’t getting much from his lower half. And, in order to get that needed oomph from your lower half, your hands have to work in unison with your shoulders, rather than having them tell the shoulders what to do. So, since Brennan’s stance kept his hands so high and apart from the rest of his body until the load (and since he lets those hands move freely during the load), something may have happened where the hands weren’t as connected to the rest of his body and he ended up swinging with not as much power as he may have in the tank.
As an added plus, Brennan was also interviewed by a friend of mine who runs an Instagram account by the name of “Guardians Realm.” During the interview, he asked Will what aspect of the game he works on most. Will replied, saying “Gotta work on the pop,” noting the critiques that the Guardians fanbase has made about his power in recent months. So if this is true, what that tells me is that Brennan has been working on hitting for more power and some of that can be noticeable by the adjustments he made over the Winter.
To me, there are so many reasons for my newfound optimism for a great year from Will Brennan. Now that Will has brought in those hands and taken out their extra movement during the load, he may now be able to unlock that power that I once thought he missed. Since he might be staying more connected than he was last year, Brennan could maybe produce consistent base hits at exit velocities he previously couldn’t reach. Not only that but since he’s opened his stance, this adjustment may help a tiny bit with his plate discipline problems.
I do think the plate discipline could still end up being a concern, but we’ll have to wait and see. What matters is that Brennan is trying to make the right adjustments to his game so he can be a more useful bat to go in tandem with his great fielding ability. The Guardians need an outfielder to impact the ball: let’s see if Brennan Will.
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